Bulletin Editor
Klaus Rohrbach
Tel. 06442 23968
e-mail: editor(at)eaasdc.eu

In the last Bulletin Stefan Burger remarked amongst other things that the Bulletin dealt with problems that dominated the Square Dance world “20 or 30 year ago” and that the Bulletin contained “1/3 information about the association, 1/3 flyers and 1/3 old reprinted articles from the last 30 years”.

Because my own experience and knowledge was completely different and as I did not want to claim unproven statements, I sat down and made a survey of all the Bulletin issues I have been responsible for as Editor. This has been since the Bulletin in May 2010. I have distinguished between:

a. Flyers and ads

b. Official information and contributions from the EAASDC and ECTA, as well as from their boards or staff

c. New articles. These are all articles which have not been published before in the Bulletin, but they may have been published in other sources such as the Advanced News, ZIP Coder, Club Newsletters, Club magazines and so on. I understand that most of our readers do not read or get access to such publications, so I consider such a reprint as being new for our Bulletin. Moreover not one of such “foreign” texts is from “20 or 30 years ago”. My private library contains as its oldest some articles from the “Advanced News” from 1998 and only two articles from that time have been reprinted, so the age of the articles is far away from “20 or 30 years”.

d. Old articles, which are reprinted from previous Bulletins

The figures show that Stefan’s claim is far from being correct and I would appreciate, (similar to the objection of Ralf Bender in the last Bulletin about incorrect probability calculations), if statements would only be made after some objective estimation has taken place. It does not need a detailed calculation, as given above, to find out the true facts. The facts are easy to estimate.

By the way, during my job as Editor there have been the following reprints from old Bulletins: 3 pages from 1983, 6 pages from 1995, 4 pages from 1997, 8 pages from 1999 and in the December issue 7 pages as a mixture from 1997, 1998 and 2006. I think none of these counts as “from 20 or 30 years ago”. And I am sure the situation was not different before I started in May 2010.

However, true is that this time, for the June Bulletin 2011, there were very few new contributions; hence I took a number of “old” articles from the Bulletin or other publications. Otherwise you would have received this time a Bulletin of only about 44 pages. I therefore repeat my request to participate in making this Bulletin, as I have already stated in the November Bulletin:

I would like to remind you that the Bulletin, our Bulletin, does not justBoard of Directors, it is a publication made for you all and made by you all. Your participation is asked for. Don’t lean back and just read – give us your opinion, your knowledge and your experience.

I will not comment on whether the proposals of Stefan Burger to change the Bulletin into a “citizen’s letter” is covered by the purpose of the Bulletin as given in the EAASDC Statutes. This is the task of our Board. At least the Bulletin’s purpose is “to spread new information that is of interest to SD clubs and their members”. And especially to publish the minutes of meetings, lists of members of the EAASDC and ECTA boards, letters by these boards, the calendar, the Dictionary, the list of Friendship Badges, advertisements of Jamborees and general information on SD, RD, Clogging and Contra.

In order to avoid that some readers put the focus only on the age of an article, I will for the time being omit exact details and will only state “reprint from Bulletin”. If somebody wants to know those details, please contact me.

At least I tried in the past and also in this current issue to publish a mixture of very different subjects and as attractive as possible also for current readers, even if the article was “historic”.

And there are readers, which consider the benefit of “old” articles completely different, somebody made for example a comment on the December Bulletin, where I repeated something from 1998:

…all dancers should have read these rules for Advanced Dancing, because it is valid in my opinion in the same way for preceding levels.

And there are more, about 10, of similar comments (which I don’t want to repeat here) on “ancient” articles, saying thanks for the repetition.

So I will try to proceed. And I ask for your support.